All or Nothing
by Missie2
Summary: A badly injured princess floats into Arendelle's ocean and into Elsa's heart, trailing with her a country's worth of sorrow, strife and the ever-present spectre of death.
1. Chapter 1

**All and Nothing**

Author's note: I wrote it 'cos I ship it, and because I wanted to write an epic worthy of the ship. Not much to say beyond that. It's going to get grim and will likely stay that way so be warned.

…

Chapter 1

…

If you'd asked Elsa what brought her out onto the open water in the middle of the night in question, she wouldn't have had an answer. On mild summer nights she frequently had trouble sleeping, and without any paperwork or delegation to occupy her time with she usually patrolled the castle restlessly. She rarely left the castle, unless it was to cross the courtyard or sit by the fountain watching the stars.

That night, a perfectly normal night with a half-moon in the sky and a mild wind ruffling the tower pennants, something like a small, indistinct whisper drew her attention to the ocean. The waves were miniscule, the water like dark rippling glass clear as a mirror. The impulse hit her hard. She took so few risks with her powers, even now with the 'incident' long past… what could a little excursion hurt? Before she knew it, she was out of the castle and tiptoeing across the beach, looking around in case anyone saw. Not that anyone would have said anything, even if she had been seen, but old habits were hard to break.

The first step onto the water tore an excited little giggle from her. When she'd ran across the fjord before she'd barely registered what she'd done, so consumed by her fear and panic, but deliberately freezing the water – for _fun, _no less – so she could walk across it was about as close to an act of rebellion as she was likely to get. The ice she made was only a few inches thick, and shifted as she moved her feet so that she didn't so much step across the surface as glided. The brightest stars twinkled in the reflection of the water, and underneath the murk she spotted the flickering of fishes fleeing from her footsteps.

She was half a mile out before she realized it, and stopped there to gaze at the moon and breathe in the sharp salty air. The cold refreshed her, blew the cobwebs from her brain as one of her advisors was fond of saying. The heat made her feel sluggish and irritable, the crisp marine breeze was the perfect medicine. She titled her head back, closed her eyes and filled her lungs with the stinging chill.

Suddenly, Elsa felt a presence tugging at her, a whisper on the wind. Half a mile out at sea, who could have been there? But sure enough, when she looked behind her, there was a small boat, caught in the spaces between the icicle stepping stones she had created. She hesitated, unsettled by its sudden appearance, though it looked to be empty. And yet, the pull towards the little boat felt almost physical, as though an invisible rope had been looped through her temple and was getting tighter.

Slowly, she approached it. It wasn't like any boat she'd seen made in Arendelle; it looked like the shell of some enormous insect, round and shiny-hulled and covered with a sheet of leather. All over it was carved with strange interlocking symbols. Elsa repressed a shiver; symbols could mean magic, and even a hint of magic not her own made her nervous. Nevertheless, she drew up beside the boat, pulled back the leather and peered inside.

And even through her shock, horror and confusion, she felt a sensation wrap around her heart akin to burning.

There was a girl in the boat. Or the remains of a girl. Curled up like a wounded animal, dressed in a tattered white gown and so pale the only part of her that didn't blend in with her dress was the brilliant shock of red hair splayed out across the inside of the boat. Irregular dark stains across the front of the gown could only have been blood. The broken shaft of an arrow protruded from her upper arm, and another from her calf. She didn't appear to be breathing.

Elsa let out a shuddering breath.

"Oh, you poor…" she began, leaning over the boat, but she couldn't finish. Not knowing what to do, she reached over to brush the girl's hair away from her eyes.

As soon as her fingers touched the girl's skin, the girl woke with a pained gasp. Elsa let out a little scream and fell backwards, only stopped from falling clear into the sea by her panic conjuring a sheet of ice to break her fall. She clambered back to her feet and held the side of the boat, watching the very much alive girl take deep wheezing breaths and struggle to move. She was mumbling something high pitched and frantic, could have been her native tongue or just delirious rubbish for all Elsa could tell.

Elsa reached into the boat to grasp the girl's wrists, to hold her still. The girl's eyes fluttered open and peered at her through her matted hair.

"Stay still," Elsa commanded with an authority she pulled from the very reaches of her being. Truthfully, she felt as helpless as the girl in the boat. "Don't move around, you'll hurt yourself. I'll help you."

It was impossible to tell if the girl understood what she was saying, but she stilled. She held Elsa's gaze for a moment that seemed to stretch for hours.

"_So blue…."_ Elsa thought absently.

Then the girl's eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped further into the boat. Elsa held her wrists for a moment, feeling her thread pulse beat against her fingers, pondering the best course of action.

And though common sense, which in Elsa's head sounded an awful lot like Advisor Holm, dictated that she should leave the boat where it was until the coast watch could be sent to investigate it, she got behind the boat and pushed it to shore herself.

…..

At dawn Elsa was watching the sun cast shadows over the hallway outside the guest room as she waited for the doctor to emerge when Anna came charging down the corridor in her usual excitable flurry. She was even more frenzied this morning, her hair sticking up like it was trying to escape from her head, wearing one slipper and no robe. She flopped into the chair beside her sister and gripped her shoulder as if trying to physically leech the information out of her.

"Tell me everything!" she demanded, grinning eagerly. As with most important things, Anna missed the gravity of the situation entirely.

"There's not much to tell," Elsa told her. "I found a boat, there was a girl in the boat, she's injured, so I brought her back here and called the doctor."

"Aw, come on! That can't be all there is!" Anna moaned, tugging at her hair in frustration. "Where do you think she came from?"

"I don't know."

"How did she get injured?"

"No idea."

"Is she gonna be okay?"

"The doctor hasn't said anything yet…"

"What were you doing out there anyway?"

"I…." Elsa hesitated. "I was getting some air."

"You were, like, a mile out at sea!"

"Half a mile. And who told you that?"

"I heard the servants talking. Everyone's talking about it."

Elsa groaned and rubbed at her temple. So much for her peaceful little ocean stroll.

"Did she look really bad?" Anna asked, with a concerned glance at the closed bedroom door. For all her awkwardness, she was a caring little soul.

"I thought she was dead," Elsa said quietly. "She looked dead."

They sat in silence for a while, before Anna excused herself to get dressed. She promised to bring Elsa some coffee and pastries to maintain her vigil with. She'd been gone less than ten minutes when the doctor finally emerged.

He was grim-faced and tired, wiping his hands with an iodine-soaked cloth. The front of his apron was splashed with blood and other fluids and Elsa couldn't help staring as he removed it. She pulled him into her study to discuss the patient.

"How much do you want to know, or will I just leave the report?" he asked her. As the royal physician, and the man who had delivered both princesses, he was used to speaking to the royal family as an equal.

"Give me the basics, please. I'll read the report later," she said.

"She'll make a full recovery, but slowly," he began. "She's malnourished, of course, and dehydrated. I removed two broken arrows from her arm and leg, neither wound was infected so I suspect she was cleaning them with sea water. One other arrow wound on her torso, a near miss. Early stages of frostbite on her fingers and toes. Broken ribs already in the process of healing when she was put out to sea, lash marks across her back."

When he stopped his listing, Elsa let out a breath.

"She was running from something," he said with an air of the macabre. "And whatever it was, it got a few good licks in before she got away."

"Yes," she agreed. "Well, at least she's safe now."

"Safe?" the doctor chuckled without humour. " My queen, perhaps making an enemy of the person who did this would not be a wise idea."

"I do not believe you've been added to my roster of advisors, Doctor," she told him stiffly. He raised his eyebrow, but held his tongue.

Just then, Anna reappeared with the coffee and pastries she'd promised, and the doctor took his leave. The sisters ate together, then Elsa claimed she was going to catch up on her sleep. Anna skipped away to find Kristoff, or Olaf, or just plain mischief.

Before she left for her quarters, Elsa tiptoed into the spare room to check on the injured girl.

The tattered dress had been cut off of her and replaced with a clean blue nightgown, which did a lot to make her look more alive. Against the starched white sheets the dark circles under her eyes stood out so much more, and the hollows in her cheeks. If one looked closely they could map out the veins under her skin. Her hair, though, was magnificent, freshly washed by whoever had dressed her and bright as flame, lying in long cascading spirals across the pillows. Before she even knew she was doing it, Elsa had threaded her fingers into the damp mass and was gently playing with it.

The girl breathed deeply and turned her head towards Elsa's hand. Elsa snatched it away as though she'd been burned, cheeks flushing pink, and took herself off to her bedroom.


	2. Chapter 2

All or Nothing

Chapter 2

Note on the languages used in this chapter, although they're real languages for the purpose of this fic they are proxies for non-existent countries that exist in this universe. I'm afraid I'm just not clever enough to invent a new language just for this fic.

…..

Over the next few weeks, while the injured girl recuperated in a drug-induced stupor, Elsa tried to keep her mind on affairs of state, with only cursory enquiries as to her health and what was being done to help her. Solveig was their best maid for this kind of thing, she'd nursed Anna through measles, pox, fever, fractured limbs and she'd taken care of Elsa once through a bone-shaking bout of influenza with quick but caring hands.

"She's no trouble, your highness," Solveig had told her one evening when the queen caught her running back to the bedchamber with clean linens and a steaming bowl of water. "She thrashes about at night so I have to redo her bandages, and she can't swallow too well, but she doesn't make a fuss."

Elsa nodded and sent her on her way, mentally adding a few figures to Solveig's wages.

Leafing through her papers, the words seemed to drift away from her and her thoughts refocus around the mystery occupying the spare bedchamber. The doctor was right, in a way. Arendelle was a merchant city first and foremost; its military was small and mostly dedicated to protecting their borders from bandits. They were protected by their trading allies and their considerably bigger armies. If the girl was running from someone who had a great force at their disposal, there could be trouble.

On the other hand, the kind of person who would inflict such injuries on a young girl, even if she was some sort of criminal, how could she bring herself to take that person's side? Or perhaps she wasn't a criminal at all but a refugee. Arendelle had hosted the displaced before, when clashes between two of their allies had driven peasants from their homes and into neutral territory. Many of them had arrived at their gates injured, weeping, telling tales of family murdered by soldiers high with bloodlust.

But, she reminded herself, it could be a feint. The debacle with Prince Hans had rattled her, left her second-guessing people's motives all the time. Someone could look so benign and turn out to a monster, a wounded girl could be a highly dedicated assassin. Stranger things had happened, and now that her powers were public knowledge some countries were nervous about what it meant for them. Who was to say that this girl wasn't a complicated means to a Trojan Horse plot to usurp the throne?

The trolls had gifted her an object, to ward against ill intentions. A memory book, a book filled with blank parchment, but one drop of blood or a strand of hair would provide a portrait of the donor's life and give an insight into their minds. She hadn't yet used it, afraid if she brought it up it would create bad feeling.

What clearer reason could she be given to use it now?

…..

Solveig knocked on her door mid-afternoon, 3 weeks to the day since Elsa had come across the little boat.

"Begging your pardon, your highness, but you asked me to tell you when our patient is better equipped to talk," she said, clutching at her skirts. "She's quite lucid now, though I can't understand a word she says."

Elsa's stomach lurched, but she summoned all of her formidable dignity, thanked the maid and marched to the patient's chamber.

The girl was sitting slightly up as she entered, staring at the ceiling with a blank expression. She looked much better now, with some colour and plumpness in her cheeks, but she was still too pale and listless. The vibrancy of her hair just served to make her look bloodless. She looked up as Elsa made her presence known, straightening with some difficulty. Elsa held out a hand to stop her, and she slumped back with a light sigh of relief.

Elsa placed herself delicately in the chair beside the bed, with the girl's eyes nervously scanning her every move, and addressed her in her own tongue.

"_Kan du forstå hvad I siger?"_

The girl just blinked. Elsa tried the languages of her neighbouring countries.

"_Können Sie verstehen, was I sage?"_

"_Vous comprendrez ce que veux dire I?"_

"_Si può capire che cosa sto dicendo I?"_

Nothing. The girl now knew Elsa was trying to communicate but shook her head to each language she tried, and she was rapidly running out of the ones she knew. Finally, almost as an afterthought, she tried Angolsi.

"_Do you understand what I'm saying?"_

The girl's head shot up almost violently, curls flying everywhere. Elsa started, despite herself.

"_Yes," _she replied.

"_You speak Angolsi?" _Elsa almost whispered, conscious that gossipy maids could be walking by.

"_Yes, but not too well," _the girl answered.

Elsa was relieved. From the singsong lilt of her accent it was clear Angolsi wasn't the girls' first language. Angols was a large country with a fearsome reputation for making war, and Elsa had learned the language as a precaution though Arendelle had historically had no contact with them. They were landlocked and far away enough to not be considered a threat. Still, her father had sent their royal family extravagant gifts from time to time to keep them on side, just to be safe.

"_Where am I?" _the girl asked in halting Angolsi. Elsa ceased her pondering and fixed her with her most formidable look.

"_You are in the sovereign state of Arendelle," _she answered. _"I am Queen Elsa of Arendelle. And I have yet to learn your name, so let's begin with that."_

For all that she was a stranded foreigner in a strange land in the presence of the queen of said land, the girl showed no signs of being intimidated by her. Elsa soon discovered why.

"_Merida," _she answered quietly. "_Princess of Clan Dunbroch."_

A princess. Elsa's mind reeled. Every moment seemed to deepen the quandary she was facing.

"_But that was before," _the girl continued. "_I am nobody now."_

…..

They spoke long into the night, as the awful story of how the former Princess Merida drifted into Arendelle in such a sorry state came out piece by piece. She related it dispassionately, as though it had happened to someone else. It was an unpleasant tale, to say the least, and though Elsa listened and only interjected to offer words her guest couldn't think of and kept her face blank, after she left the bedchamber she went straight to her office and sat there for a long time, shaking.

It began with an Angolsi Duke who had travelled to Dunbroch campaigning for the hand of their princess. Merida's people were Ceilts, a secretive race who inhabited harsh northern lands and defended their borders so ferociously that only whispers of their existence had made it to Arendellian ears. The princess had just turned down three of her fellow Ceilts for marriage, and they looked on the outsider with suspicion.

Duke Augustus Warrick was forty-nine years old, and had already married and buried two young wives and claimed their lands in his stead. Merida found him unsettling to be around, and was put off that he had travelled so far to seek her hand and yet didn't speak a word of Gaelic, her mother tongue. Her father disliked him because he'd heard his reputation as a covetous man from humble beginnings who left a trail of dead men with every rise of his station. And her mother disapproved of the way he looked at her, 'like a dog looking at a man's dinner plate.'

They declined his offer, and the Duke left amiably enough, wishing the royal family well as he took his entourage away. They thought no more about it, although Merida herself remained uneasy and nervous for seemingly no reason at all.

Half a year to the day after the Angolsi man had departed, they were invited to a feast to celebrate the birth of a son for an old ally of the Dunbroch Clan, Clan Machblair. Merida hadn't wanted to go, probably sensing from the summons that something was off about the invitation. Her father had laughed off her fears on the basis that after seven daughters 'that randy old goat Machblair' deserved to celebrate finally getting a boy to carry his name.

It was a trap, of course. The old goat had been promised high-ranking Angolsi husbands for his daughters by Duke Warrick as a reward for securing the princess, and through her the Dunbroch crown. The king was shot full of crossbow quarrels from men perched in the rafters, for no-one was brave enough to face him in true combat. The queen's head was struck from her shoulders as she ran screaming to her dying husband's side.

Merida had managed to break loose in the confusion that followed her parent's death, fighting her way through the men sent to secure her with a battle-ax and using a serving platter as a shield and scaling a tapestry to escape out of a window. She knew the surrounding forest well enough to make her way back in the blackest of night to Dunbroch, where she raised the alarm. She instructed every man, woman and child in the castle gather anything they needed to survive and flee as far north as they could.

Her own horse, the one she had left in the stables to travel by carriage to the feast, she gave to her childhood nursemaid. This woman was entrusted with the lives of Merida's younger siblings, the princes, along with her warrior husband to protect them all. They had been the hardest to convince to leave, the nursemaid dithered and fretted and panicked and the boys clung to the princess' skirt and refused to let go, until Merida spelled out exactly what Warrick would do to them when he caught up.

"_He wouldn't kill me, he needed me to get the throne,"_ Merida told Elsa as though she were commenting on the weather. _"But the princes are the heirs to the throne, he'd have had their heads hanging from the doorway soon as he got through the gate."_

In the end, the nursemaid's husband had scooped them all up and swept them away. Two of the boys were crying out for her as they left, one tried to escape his protector's arms to run back to her. One by one, and with most in tears begging the princess to come with them, the castle's occupants disappeared into the dark of the forest. In the distance, the light from the torches of Warrick's approaching army were rapidly blinking closer to Dunbroch.

Merida's final act before Warrick blustered into the courtyard was to cover every room in the castle with pitch and straw and set it all ablaze. He found her there, watching the flames roar out of the windows consuming all of its valuable innards, and laughing.

…..

Merida couldn't put the next occasions in an accurate timeframe, as she said the days and nights bled into each other. Warrick's first order was for her to be whipped publicly and for Dunbroch's villagers to watch, hoping that even if Merida herself didn't give up the location of the princes that the villagers would be intimidated enough to do it on her behalf. The princess didn't utter a word, and her stoicism was matched by her people.

He left her tied to the rack overnight as a warning, but that failed when an elderly farmer crept to her side to offer her water and cover her with a blanket. The man was hung from a tree in her line of sight the next day, but that night a young woman repeated the farmer's actions. She too was hung, and she too was replaced the next night by the tavern keeper. Warrick realized then that he'd run out of countrymen to rule over if he kept hanging them, so he moved Merida into the tower of the gutted castle away from the rustics.

His next plan was to starve her into submission, interspersed with occasional beatings with a club when his anger became too much for him to bear. He was at least careful not to touch her face, as a bloodied bride would reflect badly on him and he was already losing the war of public opinion both in Dunbroch and with his peers back in Angols. She continually spurned him both in his efforts to wed her and his efforts to find out where she'd hidden her brothers. Finally, he made a threat that she refused to divulge to Elsa, and she agreed to marry him.

She addressed the townspeople of Dunbroch on the day before she was due to wed, in Gaelic. To any man who could understand rudimentary Gaelic the princess was merely informing them of her engagement and her abiding love for her intended by way of a romantic poem in the old tongue. Truthfully, she was instructing them to flee northbound while the Angolsi men were distracted by the wedding by way of a code hidden in the lines of the poem. It was an old trick, seldom used but well-known in Dunbroch.

The wedding day itself passed her in a blur. The Angolsi men drank heavily and made crude insults towards her family and her land. Her new husband pawed at her as though she were a tavern wench. She took the blunt knife from the dinner table and dug it into the wood of the chair she was sitting on to keep from screaming. By the end of the meal, she'd cut a furrow so deep it nearly went straight through.

The village women had begged an audience with the princess on her wedding day and Warrick, being in a good mood, granted it. They presented her with a gift so humble it made the wedding guests laugh cruelly, but Merida's sharp eyes saw it for what it was. A wedding bouquet of pink valerian, scutellaria and St John's Wort. All powerful sedatives, especially when mixed together. There was a message written on the binding of the bouquet, hidden in the spirals of the drawn symbols, which told of a boat that had been built for her waiting in a cave at the southernmost cove to spirit her away when she made her escape.

Of course, when the feast ended and she went to her bedchamber amid ribald jeering, Warrick knew from the moment she handed him the goblet of wine that it was drugged. He threw it across the room in a fury, tore her dress away at the shoulders and bit and sucked at her body as though he was trying to tear off chunks of her flesh. This, however, was what she had counted on, for she hadn't drugged the wine at all. She'd spread the sap from the ground flowers across her chest and torso instead, and the first five minutes of their wedding night ended with Warrick collapsing into a table.

The noise alerted the guards, who began breaking down the door, otherwise she would have smothered Warrick where he lay. Instead she pulled her dress back on and climbed out of the window. By the time she reached the base of the tower the alarm had been raised, the walls were being manned by archers and she was being searched for. Even so, she scrambled up the outer wall and down the other side before she was spotted.

Merida picked up her skirts and fled as fast as she could, but a red-haired girl in a white gown on a clear moonlit night was as clear a target as one could get, and when they shot at her they found their mark. Desperate, she threw herself into the river and let it carry her for three miles until it spat her out in the shallows. Blessedly, it was only a half-mile to the cove that held the promised boat, and when she found it she used the last of her strength to push it out to sea and climb in. She stayed conscious for a single day and night, scrupulously cleaning her arrow wounds and drinking rainwater before falling into a black sleep.

And when she next awoke, her hand was being held by a woman made of ice.

…..

"_That's….quite a story,"_ Elsa said, for lack of anything else to say.

Merida said nothing, just stared at the ceiling. Elsa wanted to offer some words of comfort, some assurances to this poor creature, but her duties as a queen roared their way to the forefront of her mind.

"_I must have some proof that your story is true, for the security of the realm,"_ she said.

"_I don't have any proof, I'm afraid."_ Merida told her. _"I burned most of the proof."_

"_I don't require much. Just a strand of hair, if you please." _

Merida turned to look at her then, eyes narrowed. Then she shrugged.

"_Take what you want."_

The Princess plucked three strands herself and handed them to Elsa, who wrapped them in a strip of linen and stood to leave. But before she did, Merida called out to her.

"_Your majesty? If it pleases you…"_

"_Yes?"_

She hesitated, as though the words themselves were painful.

"_When I am recovered, I ask that you make me a servant in your kingdom. I am strong and willing to work hard in your employ."_

Elsa felt the burning behind the words as keenly as if she'd spoken them herself. Princesses were raised to keep their pride as royals at the very core of their being, and to have to ask for help in this way was excruciating for them both.

"_We shall see," _Elsa said, and swept out of the room, unwilling to look at her any longer.


	3. Chapter 3

All or Nothing

Chapter Three

…..

Got a wee bit caught up with other fics, trying to write an original work that's going to be a sort of twin of this work and real life stuff. But I'm having a lot of fun playing around in the fandom and it looks likely to stay that way, so I'll try to update more often.

…..

Merida recovered her faculties well enough to be up and walking, Elsa was told, and she had to wrestle with the decision as to what should be done with her. Sending her to the refugee compound was out of the question, no matter what she said she was still a princess. At the same time, she hadn't a penny to her name and not even the clothes on her back, the ones she'd arrived in having been burned long and ever ago. She couldn't be allowed to wander freely around the kingdom, they still had to confirm that her story was true, and Elsa hadn't been able to bring herself to use the hair strands she'd been given. She was afraid of what she'd see.

Eventually, she gave a decree that Merida be allowed to remain in the castle as a guest of the crown. They opened some unused guest chambers near the central towers and moved her there, and while she was free to explore the castle itself and the grounds, she was forbidden to leave without an escort. She explained this to Merida in person, as nobody in the castle besides Anna spoke any Angolsi, and she nodded along solemnly.

There wasn't really any need to put restrictions on Merida, however; she seemed wholly uninterested in leaving the castle, or indeed her own chambers. She spent some time in the towers, Elsa knew, because she could see the towers from her office and she saw her sitting on the ledge sometimes staring out at the ocean. She rarely spoke to anyone, rarely smiled, never laughed. She seemed lost in despair.

The castle staff were lit up with gossip. They called Merida 'the little red ghost' and swapped shifts to try and get a glimpse of her, they traded information greedily. Elsa caught two chambermaids giggling outside of her bedroom, not even trying to be quiet. Her advisor would have told her to hold her tongue, so as not to be fuelling more salacious gossip, but she couldn't contain her anger.

"That girl is a guest of the crown. You will treat her with the same respect you would treat me or Princess Anna, " she told them, deliberately pulling the temperature around them down a few degrees.

"Yes, your highness," one of the maids stammered, white as milk.

"Please accept our apologies, your highness," the other said, bowing so low she nearly fell over.

"I want you to inform the rest of the staff that I don't want to hear anyone talking about a '_little red ghost'_ or they'll be forced to find a new place of work. I trust you can spread that information for me."

When she mentioned the nickname, both maids went from white to scarlet. They murmured their acquiescence and hurried away, probably to work harder than they'd ever worked before.

Elsa knew it wouldn't stop the gossip, but they'd be more discreet about it.

…..

She kept her distance from Merida, except when it was necessary. She couldn't understand why, but being around her was uncomfortable, and Merida seemed to feel similarly. She wore her pain so clearly it could be felt in waves. Elsa's only experience with pain was her own, and she couldn't have offered any comfort even if she knew how. For all that Elsa found the nickname offensive, Merida truly was like a little ghost, haunting the castle and tiptoeing on the peripheries of her vision.

It was Anna who stepped in to change all that, though. Initially she'd been hyper-aware of her own awkwardness when meeting new people and avoided Merida out of shyness, but perhaps memories of her own loneliness growing up in the castle drove her to act. One afternoon, clutching an Angolsi phrasebook and a basket of pastries she'd lifted from the kitchen, she approached Merida where she was sitting in the tower and chattered away at her about nothing for almost four hours. Elsa saw all this from her office, Anna babbling away and rifling through the book while Merida just nodded along, baffled.

But they became fast friends after that. Merida was probably just glad of some distraction, and Anna was delighted to have a girl to talk to who wasn't her sister (Elsa, try as she might, was still quite stiff and formal even in Anna's presence). Their chats were farcical to watch, more like a long confused game of charades than anything else. Anna's grammar was awful, and she kept mixing up basic words. Elsa once came across Anna and Kristoff trying furiously to explain something to Merida with a lot of flapping and hand-wringing.

"Elsa! You need to help us!" Anna called to her as she passed by. "I just introduced her to Kristoff and it's all gone wrong!"

Sure enough, Merida was frowning at Kristoff and slowly backing towards the door.

"What did you say to her?" Elsa asked.

Anna rifled through the book and spoke dreadful, garbled Angolsi. Merida's frown deepened. Elsa sighed heavily.

"Anna, you just told her Kristoff is a horse that sells children."

Elsa smoothly detailed the error to Merida, and introduced him properly while Anna cringed in the corner. Once she understood what had happened, Merida laughed with relief. It was a small laugh, barely a chuckle really, but enough to show she wasn't completely lost.

As the weeks passed and summer became autumn, Merida was often found in Anna's company, being dragged around the castle to whatever Anna thought she needed to see or leafing through picture books in the library. Grateful as she was to Anna for taking their refugee under her wing, Elsa couldn't help but feel a little stab of jealousy for their camaraderie. Even having lost everything, Merida had the full attention of another girl while Elsa was so often alone.

…..

August brought a heatwave that Elsa was loathe to interfere with, except to add extra ice to the stores in the kitchens. All the windows were thrown open and people wore as few clothes as they dared, almost everyone was short-tempered and sulky. Anna's condition was put down to being irritable with the heat. She complained about her head hurting, and took more naps than usual.

(Merida, at this time, spent almost all of her time in the towers where it was cooler. Anna had declared it boring and left her to it.)

The rash wasn't noticeable until it had been there almost two weeks, at which point it had spread to her face and made a butterfly-like pattern across her cheeks and nose. She fainted at breakfast, burning hot with fever, and upon stripping her to give her a cool bath they discovered the purple-red rash all over her back, stomach and chest. She was put to bed, and the doctor called, but he hadn't seen anything like it before.

Just a day later, a maid who had been serving breakfast collapsed and was discovered to have the same spreading rash. Within three days, five of the kitchen staff had it. The doctor ordered them quarantined in the south wing and all the linens in the castle boiled and the surfaces scrubbed.

Anna was steadily getting worse. She was delirious, calling out for her mother and father, Kristoff, Elsa, even Olaf at times. She couldn't sleep, her muscles spasmed with pain and any food she was given came back up within minutes of eating it.

To anyone that encountered her during that time, Elsa was the epitome of a cool, controlled leader. The threat of this strange new plague was terrifying, but she handled the quarantine measures with grace and efficiency. She sealed off the castle and everyone in it, herself included, to prevent the spread of the plague. She brought in surgical protective wear for the staff at great expense and kept the household calm and reassured.

In private, she was a mess. She barely slept with worry. She couldn't bring herself to visit Anna's sick bed, so afraid she was of what she'd see. After so many years of isolating herself away from her beloved sister, to have her so cruelly snatched away when they'd just begun to reconnect was something she wouldn't survive willingly. She spent the nights locked in her office, slumped across her desk, weeping.

…..

After one particularly bad night, Elsa found Merida leaving Anna's bedchamber with a small harp she'd found somewhere. Needing something besides the plague to talk about, she asked her where she'd found it.

"I found it at the back of the library," Merida answered. "It helps her sleep."

"That's very sweet of you," Elsa told her, because it was. "But you should be wearing protective clothing in there, or you'll get sick too. Please remember that next time."

Elsa turned to go, until Merida said something that stopped her in her tracks.

"Oh, I already had it when I was little."

Elsa spun around and grabbed Merida's shoulders so hard she winced.

"You had it? _You've seen this before?" _Elsa gasped.

Merida was in severe danger of having that look of confusion etched permanently on her face.

"Yes? We all had it. Everyone gets it when they're children," she said, shrugging off Elsa's grip. "Is this really the first time you've seen it?"

"We've never seen anything like this before," Elsa told her. A slow warmth was blooming in her chest; here was a way to possibly save Anna, and the rest of the country with her.

"Huh, no wonder she's so sick…" Merida mumbled.

"Is there a cure?"

To her horror, Merida shook her head.

"No, you just have to wait for it to leave on its own. And give them honey in hot water to help the throat swelling. Although…."

"Although what?"

"There's a herb we use, it cleans the blood or something. But I don't know if it grows here…."

Elsa let go of her shoulders, only to grab her hand and drag her down the hall to her office.

"You're going to find out," she told her.

…..

Elsa wrote up a document to allow Merida to leave the castle with Kristoff to look for the herb, but before she left they called in the doctor to describe everything she knew about the plague. Elsa translated to the best of her ability, both Merida's statements and the doctor's questions, and it took all night. Three of her advisors insisted on being present, occasionally huffing and whispering amongst themselves.

Merida's people called the plague _sruthan loiscneach, _roughly translated as river burn. It was caused by the bite of a type of larva that lived in stagnant water and passed from person to person by bodily fluids. The symptoms presented more severely in some people than others, but it was all round agreed that it was best to get it in childhood. In adulthood, it could cause blindness, limbs lost to amputation and eventually death (Elsa's stomach clenched as she translated this part.) The Ceilts treated it with hot water and wild honey, boiled mead and the mystery herb Merida was unable to describe properly in Angolsi.

Kristoff had been pacing impatiently at the door, and when they were finally done he whisked Merida away without even a passing word to anyone. Elsa couldn't fault him; he was probably the only person in the kingdom as worried as she was herself. When she saw them leave through the castle gates, she slumped in her chair and let out a long sigh.

"Your highness?"

She bit back another sigh. The doctor was leaving, but the advisors were staying.

"We have been talking…." Chancellor Makkenon began.

"I had noticed," Elsa said, sourly.

"We believe it is unwise to put so much trust in what this 'princess' says. We still haven't verified her story. And we don't believe it is prudent to trust her with the lives of our people. This herb she's looking for could be anything."

Elsa threw her hands up.

"Do you have any other solutions? I don't know if you've noticed, but my sister is on death's door and nobody else has any idea what this thing is!"

"That in itself is suspicious, your highness," Chancellor Heino said. "If this disease is as common as she says, why has it not been encountered here before? And why did it appear only after our mysterious visitor arrived here?"

Elsa fixed him with a stare that, with less control, would have frozen him on the spot. As it was, the temperature in the room plummeted.

"I don't like what you're implying, Chancellor," she bit out. "But judging purely by efficiency standards, I'm sure there are faster ways of murdering the crown princess than infecting her with a disease she may still recover from."

The advisors huffed some more and left, but what they said lingered in her mind long after they left, and long after Merida and Kristoff returned with the herb they'd been looking for, soaked to the skin and obviously exhausted.

The herb was tested, and distributed to the infected staff once they were sure it was safe, and finally mixed into an elixir for Anna. The staff recovered within two days, but Anna remained bedridden and delirious for a further two weeks.

One night, so plagued with doubt she couldn't sleep easy, Elsa followed the distant plucking of the little harp to Anna's room. She didn't go in, not wanting to disturb Anna's rest, but peeked through the half open door.

Anna was sprawled sideways across the bed, cold compresses draped across her forehead and arms. Merida was sitting on top of the covers, strumming away gently, clearly bored out of her skull. She'd been there since lunchtime.

"Can you sing that song again?" Anna mumbled in Arendellian, grabbing at Merida's arm.

"I don't know what that means," Merida told her in Angolsi.

Anna groaned, the fever having driven all of the Angolsi out of her head. She starting humming a tune off key, discordantly.

"Oh. Okay."

Merida changed the tune she'd been plucking to something higher and sweeter. She began to sing softly in Gaelic, a simple melody that lilted beautifully. Her voice was clear as a summer bird's, and Elsa was transfixed.

Anna groaned happily and threw her aching head on Merida's lap, which didn't phase her in the slightest aside from a single missed string pluck. The song was a lullaby, and it had the intended effect. Anna was soon sleeping soundly. Merida didn't even try to move her, just put the harp down and crossed her arms to wait for her to wake up.

Elsa tiptoed away then, her heart conflicted. She could understand the reservations her advisors had, she'd be a fool not to see that they made sense. But every instinct screamed that this girl was not a threat.

And that left only one way to know for sure.

The book. The hair.

The truth.

…

The lullaby Merida sings is 'Seoithion Seo Ho' a song that doubles as a warning against fairies stealing your children.


End file.
